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Ivan Illich and Jean Robert
AUTOSTOP
(English version)
filename: autostop_englisch.doc (English version)
(for Spanish version see: autostop_spanisch.doc)
date: summer 1992
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Ivan Illich and Jean Robert
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2
AUTOSTOP
Contribution by Ivan ILLICH and Jean Robert
to a Symposium on bicycle freedoms in Berlin,
Summer 1992.
We want to tell a story that reflects some nonsense about our way of life, and that story is
about traffic. We tell the story because we believe that tomorrow morning all could live in a more
quiet and perhaps even bicycle-centered society if only people believed that modesty can guide
political choice.
Reasoning shows that transport can enhance freedom of movement only within the limits
in which one can renounce it. Today, such renunciation is barely viable in a society where the
traffic jam has become paradigmatic for all kinds of consumption. Transportation, public or
private, carries inevitable consequences. Beyond a certain threshold, it diminishes personal
mobility in proportion to more passenger miles generated. Thus transportation is a monument to
the basic experience of the age. The more refined and more integrated the transporation system,
the more we live in a society of morning joggers tied down during the rest of the day.
Starting with this insight, we invite you to a mental experiment. By limiting the
compulsory auto-disempowerment produced by transportation, a society can increase the freedom
of movement enjoyed on foot or bicycle.
Not so long ago, everyone knew that the world was accessible. And until quite recently,
the "third world" lay within reach of their feet for most of its inhabitants. People could trust their
feet, experience their world. And for several decades now, U.S. border guards have admitted their
helplessness as they are overrun by auto-mobile transgressors - moving on foot.
In the 1950s, Mexico City was already a metropolis of nearly three million inhabitants,
with some forty plazas containing popular markets. Most of these markets were on the same spot
where Cortez had found them 450 years earlier. In any given week, less than one out of every
hundred persons moved beyond the border of their respective barrio. Since then, the population of
the city has increased seven-fold. Engineered traffic patterns tear neighborhoods apart; multi-lane,
one-way throughways separate people into artificial ghettoes; a high proportion of the population
is the boxed-up victim of daily, long-range transport - there is an efficient subway. Such transport
encloses students as well as pensioners, employees as much as women needing pre-natal tests.
Five million persons - according to official count - must travel daily to reach inaccessible places.
Historically, walking was never an act of pure leisure. At times, it could be dangerous,
painful, disappointing, but at other times adventuresome, enjoyable or exhilarating. But that is not
the issue. What counts is that using one's feet came at no cost. Of course, everyone had to find the
pennies to pay the ferryman. A mule or carriage were confined to the rich. Generalized mobility
was enhanced by social virtue: tolerance of the outsider, hospitality, charity and conviviality at
resting places. For the majority, these were more important than inns. People lived in the
experience that the place on which they stood was a place they had reached with their feet.
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We would like to ask a question: What does it mean that so very little of that which
enabled and graced freedom came in the nature of a commodity? Now modern engineers claim
that feet are underdeveloped means of self-transportation! Indeed, what equipped our forefathers
was inexpensive, from staff and sandals to cloak and sack; later, the bicycle. Distances, when they
were counted, were measured in days; they were perceived as life time, not as watch time. There
was nothing like the concept of a passenger mile on land until the postal coach appeared, late in
the 18th century; and then the railroad in the early 19th.
The railroad created the minute and the fare that measured the time cost of bridging
passenger miles. These concepts are basic and acquire full validity with motorized traffic. Only on
the basis of such assumptions could the locomotion of human beings be made into a commodity.
And this commodity - traffic - was produced by employed workers, whether railroad men or
chauffeurs, proto-passengers making up the consumers. All this changed with Henry Ford's
Model T. This innovation brought the news that mobility would be an industrial product to be
enjoyed only through unpaid labor. Each employee now had the "privilege" of purchasing a car.
With this investment, he had to deliver his own work force to the factory door. For many, then,
the car became the condition for selling themselves on the labor market, to purchase household
needs, to educate their kids, to visit their aged parents.
For twenty-five years we have reflected on transportation because we see in it an Ideal
Type of post-industrial commodities: a synthesis of installment payments, operating costs,
insurance premiums, and unpaid labor to make the investment actually useful. Shadow work - the
unpaid, time-consuming, disciplined, risky improvement of a commodity to make it pay - became
a foundation of modern existence. It is quite surprising how completely this self-enslavement has
remained a blind spot among the first two generations of car owners. But we now see that a
powerful spell has been cast over them. A mixture of fashion, vanity, commodity fetishism, and
greed sharpened by clever, no-holds-barred advertising created the fantasy of the automobile as a
liberator - from schedules, waiting lines, limited horizons, pre-established routes. For most of
those born before 1970, the auto is still an enticing symbol of personal freedom through an
industrial product. But for a later generation, this is a transparent oxymoron. Rarely does one find
the distance between two generations so great.
Now let us come to our story. And the reader can decide whether it is a serious project or
a cautionary tale. The story begins with a judgment, one passed down by the Supreme Court.
According to the Court, the use of tax-supported roads shall be limited to vehicles in public
service. In effect, this means that every car with a free seat must stop when asked. To implement
the decision, Congress passes a law that restricts licences to drivers who produce passenger-miles
and earn income by doing so. No Samaritans needed. Henceforth everyone who is not a driver
will be chauffeurred, and all drivers are available as chauffeurs.
Is the unthinkable feasible? Can a simple judicial judgment turn the way we now think
about economic "goods" topsy turvy? Without any technical innovation, can a society transform
its social and physical environment? Can a small change in the character of transportation lead to
a moral reevaluation of place?
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How imagine the details? Every citizen receives a Hack-Card. If a would-be passsenger
signals a passing car with an empty seat, the driver must stop. The car contains a computer with
as many slots as there are seats. For the construction of the black box, ways of billing the patrons
and paying the drivers, Toshiba and the IRS are obviously competent. Or let Sprint instruct
highway departments on the management of channels (they have experience following the court
decision on the monopoly formerly enjoyed by Bell Telephone).
Let charges be entered on one's tax return (which could make travel cheap and/or free for
those with limited incomes) or let them be sent out like the phone bill today. Place regular waiting
stops where people signal their direction, and where every passing car with an empty seat must
stop if hailed. Make them cozy or warm on lonely corners, and shade them where the sun beats
down. Let the people themselves police their waiting lines, as they have learned to do gently in
Havana or Mexico. They can report any vehicle which runs a stop. If muggers are rampant in the
area, what better place to be but in a car, with one's Hack-Card signalling the whereabouts for the
police?
For those who see a project here, there are many practical questions to be examined. For
example: How much would traffic accelerate by eliminating tie-ups ? How much space would be
created for pedestrians and bikes? How many would renounce transportation, and when? And
who would finally be able to afford it? How many new jobs would be created for drivers as
against those lost in the car industry? What social consequences would result from discontinuing
company and government fleet cars? Could one limit the privilege of the policeman to step ahead
in line when in uniform? What would be the ecological impact? And would such a decision
accelerate the transition to less polluting vehicles? How much would be saved in public
investments? How quickly could this saving create the funds to cover the societal "loss" through
fewer cars being manufactured, purchased and driven? How face taxi driver unions when they try
to challenge the Supreme Court decision? How tell a better story to open up "the sociological
imagination"?
If this is just a cautionary tale, why do we have the experience of people getting angry
when we tell it? Are they angry because we do not propose a new technology? Nor defend an
ideology? This seems but a simple proposal for thoughtful consideration.